I'd like to be clear that we are committed to engaging with customers and discussing our products and services in forums like this - It is one of the things that makes us unique and we are never going to change that. For the next week or so though I hope everyone can appreciate the need for us to focus on properly answering the open questions in our support system that are the cause of many of the active threads in this forum.

I'd like to be clear that we are committed to engaging with customers and discussing our products and services in forums like this - It is one of the things that makes us unique and we are never going to change that. For the next week or so though I hope everyone can appreciate the need for us to focus on properly answering the open questions in our support system that are the cause of many of the active threads in this forum.

Cheers,

Ian

And indstead of forcing everyone to log into a extreamly slow and slightly annoying PlusNet forums ... you can find the annoucment below

Hi Folks,

As Iím sure readers of this forum will be aware, over recent weeks our support centre has been receiving a much higher volumes of calls and questions (previously known as tickets) than normal. A lot of these additional contacts have come from customers who are experiencing difficulties following Max upgrades, and we are working through the reported issues as quickly as we can. Because of the extra workload we are experiencing, we have not been responding to tickets or phone calls as effectively as we would like. As a result, people are (understandably) raising additional queries in order to chase outstanding issues and flagging questions in this forum which we havenít managed to address in a timely enough fashion.

Everyone therefore can, I am sure, appreciate the need for us to prioritise the clearing up of the open questions, with a view to answering them as quickly as possible. With that said, we recognise that the quality of the answers that our customers receive is more important than the speed of a response. This is an area we are focussing on with all of our staff, and a very strong emphasis is being placed on ensuring that we deal with all outstanding queries fully and with the care and attention our customers expect. The present issue in the CSC is not short-staffing, it is about the number of complex queries, mainly due to Max upgrades, that has caused a backlog. In trying to address this backlog quickly sometimes responses are too short and not of sufficient quality, which leads to repeat questions and escalations which compounds the backlog. We are also reviewing the automated responses that our system generates as these can sometimes confuse customers and cause further questions.

In order to help with this, a number of experienced employees from across the business are being drafted into the Customer Support Centre temporarily to assist with providing quality responses to outstanding open customer questions. The comms team form a body of experience with a wide range of issues and they are needed to assist with this effort. As such, for at least the next week or so, we will be reducing our profile across all public forums and focussing the people we have here on answering outstanding questions and helping to diagnose and resolve some of the more complicated customer questions that we have open.

It is important for me to point that that these forums were never intended for individual fault escalations, and the main role of the comms team is to monitor these discussion groups looking for wider patterns of problem reports, as well as collecting more general feedback from our customers. We will continue to monitor the forums during this time, but I hope everyone can appreciate why our responses here will be much less frequent during the next week or so.

By significantly improving the quality of question responses this will help clear the backlog which in turn will reduce call waiting times as we know at present more than 30% of calls are from customers chasing question responses.

We would like to thank customers for their support and patience during this particularly busy time for us. We are confident that we can deliver improvements to our support service quickly, and by focussing our resources in this was we believe we can bring question and call response times back to normal levels very quickly. We will report on our progress with this further next week.